


I prefer you flawed

by Fatale (femme)



Series: This complicated thing we have [5]
Category: White Collar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-27
Updated: 2013-05-27
Packaged: 2017-12-13 02:30:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/818912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/femme/pseuds/Fatale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neal holds out his hand and says, “Dr. Mitchell, it’s an honor to meet you.“</p><p>Alan squints at Neal for a few seconds before taking his hand, leaning close and hissing in his ear, “I don’t like you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	I prefer you flawed

I prefer you flawed  
WC: 660  
Peter/El/Neal  
PG

Blah blah. [Part five.](http://fatale.livejournal.com/tag/this%20complicated%20thing%20we%20have)

 

 

 

El’s father comes in first and Neal feels a wide, fake smile pull at his lips. He wonders if it looks like a rictus of pain.

Neal holds out his hand and says, “Dr. Mitchell, it’s an honor to meet you.“

Alan squints at Neal for a few seconds before taking his hand, leaning close and hissing in his ear, “I don’t like you.”

 

\---

 

“Salvador Dali had a threesome,” Alan says. “With his model, Ultra Violet, and a lobster.”

“ _Dad_ ,” El says, clearly mortified, at the same time El’s mom elbows him and says, “Alan.”

He shrugs. “Don’t shoot the messenger.”

“How’d it end for them?” Neal asks, morbid curiosity taking over.

“In pinches and tears, I imagine,” Alan says.

For the first time in years, Neal desperately wants a cigarette. Like, yesterday. Neal smoked years ago, stopped when he realized how much DNA he was leaving behind. Tucking old cigarette butts and used condoms back in his pocket -- his life has been a veritable cornucopia of glamour.

Peter’s in the kitchen banging away and aside from slipping in to say hello, has been safely hidden away in the nether regions of the house, probably grateful that there’s another man to take the full brunt of Dr. Mitchell’s thousand yard stare.

“Bathroom,” Neal mutters before making a hasty exit.

“Was it something I said?” Neal hears Alan enquire mildly behind him.

 

\---

 

Neal can retrace every single step he took to get to this moment, but he’s not sure where he faltered. Where, exactly, he could have taken choice a over choice b, and not ended up miserably huddled over a closed toilet seat and longing for smokes.

There’s a faint knock on the door before El says, “Neal? You okay in there? It’s, uh -- It’s been a while.”

“Come in,” he says, just loud enough for her to hear.

“Oh, Neal,” El says with a small smile when she slips in, closing the door behind her. “I thought parents would be your thing. You’d charm the hell out of them and badda bing, badda boom.”

“Not when I’m badda booming their daughter,” Neal says.

“ _Sorry_ ,” El gasps over laughter she’s only half-heartedly trying to stifle.

“This isn’t funny,” Neal insists, but El’s eyes are crinkling at the corners and her smile is -- it’s luminous. It’s the same smile that got him to agree to meet her parents, that didn’t make him bolt when she informed him that she’d filled her parents in on the _exact nature of their relationship_. Still. He feels himself reflexively smiling back, helpless in the face of her loveliness.

 _She should interrogate criminals_ , Neal thinks fuzzily. _We wouldn’t stand a chance._

“Come on back, Neal,” El says, holding out a hand, palm up. “For me?”

Neal uncurls himself and wraps her hand in his.

Whether she realizes it or not, it’s always been for her.

 

\---

 

When Dr. and Mrs. Mitchell leave, it’s like a last gasp of air for a drowning man, an eleventh hour reprieve that leaves him shaky and gasping.

Neal lets out the breath he’s been holding for _three hours_.

He feels dizzy, punch-drunk, like he’s made the biggest score of his life. Before Mrs. Mitchell leaves, she presses a gift-wrapped parcel in his hands. “For you,” she says in passing.

When he opens it, he pulls out a chunky knitted sweater, hideous, and in all the colors of the rainbow, if the rainbow in question was brown and beige.

Neal looks back at Peter in his ugly matching sweater and El with another creepy doll to replace the one that Satchmo buried, and realizes with the kind of startling clarity that’s usually reserved for movies that end with an improbable kiss in Paris, that it’s time for him to retire from crime forever.

He’s made the goddamn score of a lifetime.

 

 

 

 

The end.


End file.
